Trips, Gadgets and Upgrades

Come to think of it, I’ll tackle these three items in the title in reverse order:

The rea­son that it has been so long since I’ve posted any­thing to this blog was because of the new-and-improved release of Word­Press, ver­sion 2.1 (referred to as Ella, as in Fitzger­ald), which is the soft­ware that I use to pub­lish this blog. I needed a block of time of about 3 hours, I thought. The first step to doing the upgrade was to down­load both a backup of the data­base that Word­Press uses (SQL), as well as all of the files that made up the ini­tial blog, tak­ing care to insure that if any­thing went wrong, I could par­tially or even com­pletely recon­sti­tute the roughly 200 post­ings from just the text. I did this once, but then saw some com­ments. So I put off the upgrade, and there­fore, put off any new posts. Finally, yes­ter­day evening I had enough time to very care­fully back every­thing up, delete all of the old blog files (except for the con­tent), and then upload the new ver­sion and run the upgrade script. To my sur­prise, every­thing worked per­fectly. Either I’m bet­ter at this than I thought, or the many peo­ple who have reported going through an ordeal mov­ing to the new ver­sion had more com­plex sites than I did; I really can’t say.

At any rate, the blog is back, upgraded and improved, and despite delet­ing and upload­ing all of those files and per­form­ing a few other tasks extremely slowly and care­fully, it didn’t take 3 hours; More like 90 min­utes. The changes to Loud Mur­murs are invis­i­ble to you, dear reader. It does serve the pages far faster, and the edi­tor for doing posts has been dra­mat­i­cally improved. There are a few other admin­is­tra­tive screens and secu­rity rewrites, etc., but again, it’s all behind the scenes. Take it from me, on the other side of the site, we’ve all got new fur­ni­ture. So wel­come to Loud Mur­murs 2.1. Long time, no see.

One rea­son (among many) that I wasn’t able to find time for the upgrade (or post­ing) was a new gad­get. Our newest piece of tech­nol­ogy is a gift from my brother and his fam­ily, a TiVo. After a long wait, we’ve finally got­ten it set up and record­ing away. It was no small task, because get­ting Cana­dian list­ings require a net­work con­nec­tion if you don’t want the box mak­ing weekly long-distance phone calls to the states, because the set­ting for retriev­ing Cana­dian list­ings is — and I swear I’m not mak­ing this up — Leo, Wyoming. So, after get­ting a wire­less adapter so that we can use the TiVo with our home net­work, and after a few other elec­tronic, hard­ware and soft­ware hoops, I’m pleased that I no longer have to choose between catch­ing an episode of Heroes or writ­ing an entry here. Let’s hear it for time-shifting! I should men­tion that the other advan­tage to hav­ing this PVR (Per­sonal Video Recorder) on the home net­work is that I can copy any recorded show from the TiVo to my com­puter, and after some com­pres­sion and con­ver­sion, to my iPod. Too cool.

After my trips to Buf­falo and San Fran­cisco, our lit­tle drive down to Seat­tle felt quite short. We vis­ited for a brunch and after­noon with my brother and his fam­ily. We had a ter­rific meal at Mon­soon, an upscale Viet­namese restau­rant where you can not only get that won­der­ful clas­sic, Banh Xeo (pro­nounced Bann-show, it’s a sort of crêpe/omelette that actu­ally con­tains no eggs; the ‘crêpe bat­ter’ is a mix­ture of water, coconut milk and rice flour with a trace of tumeric and folded around hand­fuls of beansprouts, shrimp and lean pork), but also a ter­rific Vanilla French Toast made with brioche (which my niece ordered and many of us tasted). We only vis­ited for a short time, but man­aged to fit in a chilly walk on Seattle’s new Olympic Sculp­ture Park. We also picked up that affor­men­tioned wire­less adap­tor for the TiVo, and were back in Van­cou­ver before mid­night (but not that much before, due to a stop in Belling­ham to do some minor shop­ping at Target).

There’s lots more to add; when you don’t take note of things right away they pile up. I’ll try and catch up in future posts.

Oh .ca-nada

Since we now have sta­tus as Per­ma­nent Res­i­dents of Canada, I thought that this week I would flex one of my new rights. It’s not one of the more dra­matic ones (like the right to work for any employer in any field, not just my spon­sor and the line of work that my Provin­cial Nom­i­nee sta­tus lists). No, I decided to do some­thing that I’ve wanted to do ever since I knew that it was avail­able: I reg­is­tered the domain drucker.ca .

I couldn’t legally reg­is­ter a .ca domain until I was a Res­i­dent because the top-level-domain .ca is reg­u­lated by the gov­ern­men­tal agency CIRA, which stands for Cana­dian Inter­net Reg­is­tra­tion Author­ity. The choices avail­able from the drop-down menu at the CIRA web site for the types of peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions that can reg­is­ter a .ca are:

• Abo­rig­i­nal Peo­ples indige­nous to Canada
• Cana­dian Citizen
• Cana­dian Edu­ca­tional Institution
• Cana­dian Hospital
• Cana­dian Library Archive or Museum
• Cana­dian Polit­i­cal Party
• Cana­dian Trade Union
• Cana­dian Unin­cor­po­rated Association
• Cor­po­ra­tion (Canada or Cana­dian province or territory)
• Gov­ern­ment or gov­ern­ment entity in Canada
• Indian Band rec­og­nized by the Indian Act of Canada
• Legal Rep. of a Cana­dian Cit­i­zen or Per­ma­nent Resident
• Offi­cial mark reg­is­tered in Canada
• Part­ner­ship Reg­is­tered in Canada
• Trade-mark reg­is­tered in Canada (by a non-Canadian owner)
• Trust estab­lished in Canada
• (and I’m not mak­ing this up:) Her Majesty the Queen
• Per­ma­nent Res­i­dent of Canada

There it is, so I didn’t have to worry about the RCMP com­ing to break down our doors if I reg­is­tered drucker.ca before I was a Per­ma­nent Resident.

When I told a coworker about this, he said ‘You mean you waited until you really were a Res­i­dent to do this? Dude, if I’d known, I’d have bought that domain months ago and now you’d have to buy it from me!’

It’s just ‘parked’ right now. I could never get drucker.com, .org or .net, thanks to the fol­low­ers of the teach­ings of Peter Drucker, but here in the Great White North (or rather, the Great Soggy West), there was still no one who cared enough to secure my last name as a Cana­dian URL.

Is a .ca use­ful? Well, it’s more impor­tant if you’re a Cana­dian busi­ness and want to make it clear that you ship prod­ucts to oth­ers with­out the extra duties you have to pay if it’s com­ing from the US. Thus, there is an Amazon.ca and an Apple.ca. There is also a Google.ca and a Yahoo.ca, even though they are quite ubiq­ui­tous through­out the world (and Google.cn has been in the news because of cen­sor­ship issues with the Chi­nese ver­sion of that search engine).

I intend to use it per­haps as a bet­ter place to dis­play my resumé and port­fo­lio. I’ll link to this blog from it, but now I’ll have a pretty log­i­cal cen­tral address for my Inter­net iden­tity, such as it is.

A Local Online Tech Community Up for Sale

When I first thought of mov­ing to Van­cou­ver, one of the piv­otal deci­sions I made was to come and make a pre­lim­i­nary visit and go to a sort of tech trade show, called Techvibes Mas­sive. It was put on by the web site and asso­ci­ated online com­mu­nity of the first word in that name. As of today, Techvibes is up for sale on eBay. Accord­ing to the listing:

…why are we sell­ing? Our com­pany orig­i­nally had a diver­si­fied strat­egy and we’ve recently moved towards a more focused one. Our web­sites include www.clubzone.com, www.techvibes.com, www.casinozone.com, www.petsmo.com, www.discovervancouver.com… but as of the 2006 we’ve decided to focus our resources 100% on clubZone.com.

Techvibes’ Mas­sive Show was how I found my first job here, and even how we found the place we are now liv­ing in! (A chance con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger in the Beer Gar­den at the end of the day ended up with an invi­ta­tion to have a look at the condo that he was sell­ing as he was mov­ing to Toronto, and the rest…is Real Estate.)

Thou­sands of sites link in to Techvibes.com, help­ing the site achieve a Google page rank of 7, and great page index­ing. Alta Vista reports over 478,000 inbound links, with over 72,000 pages indexed on Google.

The site cur­rently pulls in approx­i­mately $5000 to $10000 per month in rev­enue from a vari­ety of sources includ­ing ban­ner ads, fea­tured list­ings, google adsense, and seo text links. In it’s prime the site pulled in over $10k per month alone just from Adsense but has dropped off in the past year from site neglect.

If some­one has the resources to build Techvibes back up, they could very eas­ily get the site up to in excess of $50k per month with only a few staff.

There includes a dou­ble opt-in data­base of approx­i­mately 42,000 pro­filed members.

The brand name Techvibes is very strong in the Van­cou­ver, BC, Canada Tech­nol­ogy com­mu­nity and could eas­ily be leveraged.

The cur­rent ask­ing price is $60,000 US (about $70,600 Canadian).

Follow-up: It appears that there is some con­tro­versy about this sale, with some mem­bers of the com­mu­nity upset about the prospect of their emails and names, etc. being sold off to the high­est bid­der. The dis­cus­sion is going on, oddly enough, on the Techvibes site itself.

One more Follow-up: Appar­ently the list­ing has been removed from eBay because:

Geesh, well who­ever com­plained to eBay — it worked. They removed the list­ing say­ing that it was ille­gal to sell a data­base of per­sonal information.

I was actu­ally plan­ning on remov­ing the eBay list­ing this morn­ing any­ways because we’ve had so much inter­est and most of the inquiries require a fair amount of due dili­gence… so I don’t think an eBay auc­tion would work unless we were able to pro­vide a lot more infor­ma­tion (finan­cials, access to ana­lyt­ics etc.) to the gen­eral public.

( –Mike Schwarz, cur­rent Pres­i­dent of Techvibes)

So the site is still up for sale, but now it will be a far less pub­lic transaction.

Home, Sweet (but Cold) Home

The trip back to Van­cou­ver was unevent­ful, and I really like the ser­vice by Qan­tus. A smooth take-off and land­ing by a 747, in-seat enter­tain­ment (I saw Borat — first half going down, sec­ond half com­ing back), and even on a 1 hour and 50 minute flight, a hot meal. It’s a pity that this afford­able and com­fort­able flight is only offered dur­ing Australia’s sum­mer months, but I’ll cer­tainly take it again if the oppor­tu­nity arises. The arrival at Van­cou­ver air­port was smooth and had no prob­lems. The Immi­gra­tion offi­cer asked about my per­ma­nent res­i­dency ID card, but when he saw the date of my paper­work, he waved me through with no fur­ther questions.

I arrived home from sunny San Fran­cisco (and aver­age days of 15–18° C) to tem­per­a­tures well below freez­ing. We’ve finally turned on our gas fire as well as the elec­tric base­board heater in our bed­room. We don’t need much heat here (it’s a small place and only one set of win­dows), but it’s def­i­nitely needed this week. The small pond out back where our Koi swim has pretty much frozen over again, and I hope they sur­vive another bout of ice over their heads.

I hear from fam­ily and friends back East that their win­ter has con­tin­ued to be freak­ishly warm. I’ve always known that our tem­per­a­ture falls when the skies clear, and aside from a bit of snow and rain on Mon­day or Tues­day, it looks like we’ll be clear and cold for the rest of the week, with highs in the lower sin­gle digits.

Respond­ing to the cold weather, I’m mak­ing ‘com­fort food’ tonight: meat­loaf and mush­room sauce, along with cau­li­flower au gratin (really, puréed cau­li­flower mixed with a lit­tle but­ter, cream, salt and pep­per and topped with shred­ded Parme­san cheese and run under the broiler for a few minutes).

It’s fun to go to Mac­world, but it’s also nice to return home, even if it’s a lit­tle colder than I’d like (and oddly enough, Cam­bridge would have been warmer to return to this year).

And from the Show floor...

Just for fun, I’m mak­ing use of the Microsoft blog­ger lounge, and they have pro­vided me with a shiny iMac, as well as var­i­ous fizzy bev­er­ages. To my right is the Adobe pavil­ion, where I just saw a demon­stra­tion by Rus­sell Brown (an Adobe guru) of some of the new tools for refin­ing selec­tions that they’ve sent to reg­is­tered users of CS2 (so I guess some­thing is wait­ing for me when I get home).

A lit­tle fur­ther off to the right is the enor­mous Apple booth. Actu­ally, booth is the wrong word. It’s more like the size of a small air­port ter­mi­nal. They’ve been run­ning demon­stra­tions of AppleTV, iLife, Leop­ard (the next ver­sion of OS X) and of course, the iPhone round the clock.

I’d be insert­ing links to every one of these things, but I don’t have the time. While no one was look­ing, I installed Fire­fox.. (Sur­pris­ingly, the machine seemed wide open — I don’t know if this was a bit of friendly flex­i­bil­ity, or a lax secu­rity pol­icy.) At any rate, it’s installed, and I’ve placed it per­ma­nently in this Mac’s dock.

This is my last day at the show, and I’ve met up with a few friends, but not as many as I’d hoped. The fact is, there are so many peo­ple here, that the days of sim­ply hang­ing out on the show floor in the aisles no longer guar­an­tees that you’ll bump into an old friend or acquain­tance. As Mac mar­ket­share goes up, the num­ber of peo­ple that I know within that mar­ket goes down. I should have pre­dicted that.

OK, I’ve heard the movie that iPod Screen Replace­ment booth to the left that includes shat­ter­ing glass too many times. Time to end this here. I’ll either wrap up at the hotel tonight or back home.